Sari Nusseibeh is surprise candidate for Fatah Central Committee

In a surprise move (rumored a week ago by Fatah activists in Jerusalem), Sari Nusseibeh has thrown his hat into the ring of Palestinian high politics, and is running as a candidate for Fatah’s Central Committee.

Nusseibeh is regarded as a master politician, and the move as highly tactical.

He has also been denounced for what is generally called political “moderation” — though longer explanation would be required to describe exactly what that means in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and internal Palestinian politics. He retreated tactically for years into his work of building up Al-Quds (Jerusalem) University, now behind The Wall in Abu Dis; he formerly taught philosophy at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah.

But, for those who want to ensure Fatah’s appeal to the “international community”, Nusseibeh would be an important choice.

If this Fatah Conference is an “Abu Mazen show” — as many delegates and media observers claim — then Sari Nusseibeh’s candidacy can be seen as a result of effective back-room lobbying. It is unlikely that he would have nominated himself without prior assurances of big support from Abu Mazen.

However, Palestinian analysts at the Bethlehem conference say that they doubt he has a reach chance among the general delegates to the conference. “He was the first person to sell out the Palestinian right of return, and he is a member of Fatah”, said one analyst, “while Fatah’s position remains that the right to return is an inalienable right of the Palestinian people”.

Nusseibeh himself did not join the active campaigning, and was not hopping from table to table or making and receiving promises at the Jacir Palace International Hotel in Bethlehem — or even at the Bethlehem Hotel where slightly less prominent delegates were staying.

I did see him walk, alone, with one colleague, out of the Terra Sancta meeting hall on Saturday afternoon, going towards a car park to leave.

Nusseibeh was appointed the PLO representative in Jerusalem following the death of Faisal Husseini in 2001, but his attempts at activism were blocked by Israel’s reprisal policy of suppressing Palestinian political activity in East Jerusalem that was developed in response to Palestinian attacks upon Israelis at the start of the Second Intifada. He was arrested several times, and he was beaten several times as well, including by student Fatah activists, then withdrew into academia.

He did foray back into politics briefly in 2003 when he and the former head of the Israeli secret service (Shin Bet) Ami Ayalon (who is definitely not an adept politician) launched an initiative — which Nusseibeh, at least, still supports — called “The People’s Voice”, whose aim is to mobilize grassroots support for a two state solution with a return to 1967 borders, Jerusalem as an open city, and a right of return of Palestinian refugees to a (demilitarized) Palestinian state, and Jews having a right of return only to Israel. The “Peoples Voice” is a sort of competition for the Geneva Initiative launched by Yasser Abed Rabbo, now Secretary-General of the PLO, and Yossi Beilin, an Israeli politician who headed the left-wing Meretz Party and who served as the Minister of Justice under Ehud Barak.

In a rare meeting with journalists a year ago, sponsored by Media Central a West Jerusalem organization that tries to help reporters better cover Israel, which we reported http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/69129 here, Nusseibeh announced that he had urged visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a meeting organized by embassy officials to introduce Brown prominent Jerusalem Palestinians, to “think very seriously about stopping aid to the Palestinians”. [Nusseibeh’s wife, Lucy, is British.] The suggestion, aimed to shock but nonetheless apparently quite serious, ran at counterpurposes to Brown’s visit to the region, which was aimed in part at promoting an “economic road map” to help improve conditions for the Palestinian people living under occupation as a kind of political incentive. The British Prime Minister seemed surprised and taken aback by his suggestion, Nusseibeh said. So, he said, he was bringing his proposal to the media: “My suggestion is to stop this (the European aid)”, Nusseibeh said. “The money being donated is just being wasted”, he said: “It is just sustaining the occupation”. Nusseibeh explained that “The Israelis are happy because they do not have to pay the cost of the occupation. The Europeans are happy because they feel they are doing their part by providing economic assistance … and the Palestinians are happy because we have jobs and we feel free.”

But, Nusseibeh said, “Israel cannot have its cake and eat it, too … Israel cannot continue occupying us and having European Union funds and American dollars”.

The Fateh General Conference decided on Saturday that the first new Central Committee in 20 years will have 18 elected members, plus four Presidential appointees that will have to be gain approval by a two-thirds majority of the Central Council and also of its larger Revolutionary Council.

Voting is now expected to start on Sunday night, and continue into the early morning hours of Monday.

UPDATE: voting is now expected to start at 3 pm on Sunday, and end around midnight. Counting the results is expected to take many hours, and conference planners say the results will not be known until Tuesday morning.

There are now 103 candidates (one withdrew overnight) for the 18 seats in the Central Committee, and some 650 candidates for the Revolutionary Council.

A dramatically more relaxed and lively — even charismatic — Mahmoud Abbas was appointed party President by acclamation on Saturday afternoon, and there were outbursts of flag waving and debka dancing around the hall, despite the 65 votes against the proposal (out of more than 2000 attendees). His new style mesmerized Palestinian journalists and security men watching the scene in the Bethlehem Peace Center, which is also serving as a sort of minimalist press center, on Manger Square in front of the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency reported today that “The total number of participants in the conference reached 2,325, including 25 Palestinians who were deported from Bethlehem during the siege of the Nativity Church in 2002“. This report can be read in full here .

Abbas, as party President, will have an ex officio seat on the Fatah Central Committee, bringing its total membership to 23 (including the 18 elected + 4 appointed members).

Abbas is also President of the Palestinian Authority, and leader of the theoretically overarching Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

There has been a certain amount of criticism around the edges of the Fatah Conference due to the unclear boundaries between the Fatah, the PA (called the “Sulta”, in Arabic), and the PLO.

Abbas’ election on Saturday had not been foreseen. Palestinian journalists sniffed that it had been “cooked” beforehand. But the celebrations appeared to have some sincerity. “It was like a wedding”, one Fatah activist said. One candidate for the Central Committee said afterwards: “Today Abu Mazen [Abbas] became a leader”. It took a look time, but it is apparently not too late, and the transformation is being greeted with relief rather than derision among all but the most hard-line sceptics.

UPDATE: Palestinian journalists and well-informed Fatah activists who are not delegates to the General Conference agreed on the likelihood that two senior Fatah men will be among four appointed members. The two “certainties” are: Salim Zaanoun, head of the Palestine National Council; Mohammed (Abu Maher) Ghneim (who, like Abbas. and the late Yasser Arafat, was one of the co-founders of Fatah) who just returned to live in the West Bank after years of staying in exile in Jordan due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords.

UPDATE: Palestinian journalists predict that the other two appointees will be Ahmad Qureia (Abu Alaa’), former Prime Minister and head of the Palestinian negotiating team during the Annapolis process, and Tayyib Abdur Rahim, who nominated Mahmoud Abbas as party President on Saturday (although one major strike against him may be the fact that a security guard in his motorcade recently shot and badly wounded a young male driver who had approached his convoy in Ramallah too fast). One major problem is that Qureia is still a candidate running for an elected seat, and Abbas told the General Conference yesterday that he will not appoint anyone who stood for election but then lost.

UPDATE: However, Fatah activists say that the issue of the four appointees is a real crisis. At least one of the four appointees will have to be from Gaza, they say. They agree with our previous analysis here that an alternate fourth appointee could be Farouk Kaddoumi (Abu Lutuf) who has served as Secretary-General of Fatah, but stayed in Tunis because he, too, objected to the Olso Accords. Just over two weeks ago, Kaddoumi told journalists at a press conference in Jordan where he had attended a meeting of the Fatah Central Committee in preparation for this Bethlehem General Conference that he had “documentary proof” (apparently a transcript of a meeting at which both Mahmoud Abbas and former Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan were present with American officials as Israeli officials said they were preparing to poison the later Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. (In press reports about this transcript that Kaddoumi waved around, Abbas doesn’t say much and is rather uncommittal, but Dahlan is totally in favor of the plan.)

A number of Fatah members have questioned Kaddoumi’s mental health after he made these statements. They also question why it took Kaddoumi five years to release such information. It was generally believed that Kaddoumi move was a desperate last-ditch manoeuver to prevent the Fatah Conference from being convened in Bethlehem (under Israeli occupation).
Many delegates to the Conference said that Kaddoumi was “not welcome” after his press conference accusations, but there has been no formal attempt either to censor him, or to bar him from running for a Central Committee position.

In today’s Fatah Conference session, the newly-charismatic Mahmoud Abbas was also uncharacteristically conciliatory. He called on “Our brother, Abu Lutuf, Farouk Kaddoumi”, to withdraw his statements, and to come back to Fatah. “We are all human, we all make mistakes, and we all forgive”, Abbas said. “Those who own their mistakes are the best among us”.

In comments made at the Jacir Palace Intercontinental Hotel in Bethlehem this afternoon, Nasser al-Qudwa, the nephew of the late Yasser Arafat and former Palestinian Ambassador to the UN in New York, who then served as Palestinian Foreign Minister, and who sponsored a resolution adopted by the Fatah Conference on Thursday calling for an official investigation that would include full examination of Israel’s role in Arafat’s death, downplayed the drama of Kaddoumi’s statements by saying that there have been many similar statements made, more or less all on the same basis. (Farouk Qaddoumi had functioned as Palestinian Foreign Minister for years before the Oslo process, but was rivalled when Nabil Shaath claimed the title after the Palestinian Authority was set up in the occupied Palestinian territory –West Bank and Gaza.)

Nasser al-Qudwa is another one of the candidates for the Fatah Central Council.

Other interesting candidates, in no particular order, are:
* Husam Khadr, former PLC member, who lives in Balata Refugee Camp near Nablus, and who has spent a total of 24 years in jail — the last a seven-year term ended that ended a year early, just nine months ago. He was also deported to Lebanon in 1988. And he was ordered to “sit down or go out” by Abbas in tense discussions two days ago, when Khadr demanded that the Central Committee produce a report on what has happened in the 20 years since the last meeting — including what money has been received, and what has been spent.

Khadr said in an interview afterwards that he told Abbas that when he was in the Conference, he was not the President of the Palestinian Authority, but just another member of Fatah, like everybody else. He said that the proposal to adopt Mahmoud Abbas’ three-hour speech to the opening session of the Fatah Conference as the Central Council report “makes me very sad. If the Central Council cannot prepare the report, how can they liberate Palestine?”

He said that the current Fatah leadership “organizes the system for their own benefit, and to continue to the end of their lives”.

What he would like to see, he said, is a new culture in Fatah in which members would “sacrifice, not to take but to give, to respect the people, not to punish them or treat them in a very bad way. This is now the problem in Fatah”. The problem nowadays, he said, is that “all the cowardly people look forward to belong to Fatah because they won’t have to pay the high price of being injured or going to jail, but there are many fruits they can harvest”.

Khadr said that “We have a very, very failed leadership. The Palestinian struggle failed because of the leadership. The people, in spite of all their suffering, are still ready to sacrifice … Our problem is our mentality. We are anti-democratic, we don’t believe in democracy, and we cannot have tools or ways to develop our tools for struggle or for anything”.

* Qaddoura Fares, one of the conference delegates who said that if there is not a Central Council report about the last 20 years, the Central Council will all fail. What does that mean? “They will get a zero” (sifr in Arabic, which also means nothing), Fares said. “Like a student who shows up at his exam without his paper, they will get a zero, and fail. They will not be re-elected”. Qaddoura Fares spent 14 consecutive years in jail, from the age of 18 until the age of 32. He is currently head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, a non-governmental organization.

*Muhammad Shtayya, a former PA economics minister, now Minister of Public Works and also head of PECDAR, the Palestinian Economic Council on Development and Reconstruction.

* Jibril Rajoub, former head of the Preventative Security Services in the West Bank, who dropped out of politics for a while to earn a Masters’ degree in Israeli studies at Sari Nusseibeh’s Al-Quds University. Rajoub is currently head of the Palestinian Football Federation and the Palestinian Olympic Committee.

* Nabil Amr, spokesperson for the Sixth Fatah Congress, former Minister of Information, who was shot and badly wounded (his leg had to be amputated) while standing on the balcony of his apartment after criticizing Yasser Arafat on Palestinian television. He is currently Palestinian Ambassador to Egypt, and to the Cairo-based League of Arab States.

* Saeb Erekat, experienced Palestinian negotiator and head of the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit.

* Tawfiq Tirawi, former Chief of Palestinian General Intelligence in both the West Bank and Gaza, currently head of the training facility for Palestinian police in Jericho. He was also reportedly very upset at President Abbas’ suggestion that his three-hour
speech at the opening session could be considered the report by the Central Council covering the last 20 years’ activity.. Several people in the closed hall said that Abbas’ body guards then “beat up”, or “beat”, or maybe slapped once or perhaps just pushed Tirawi. Others denied or tried to minimize the matter.

* Munir Maqdah, top Fatah military official in Lebanon, living in a refugee camp, and subject to pressure bordering on persecution by several different parties, from all sides, including Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian. He has been considered uncorruptable. An official in the Fatah Conference administration say that Munir Maqdah is one of only a few people to whom Israel refused to give permission to enter the West Bank to attend the meeting.

* Nabil Sha’ath, member of the Central Committee from Gaza, former Minister of Planning who turned that post into a rival Foreign Ministry. He is also a businessman, as is his son.

* Salah Ta’amri, former Minister of Sport in the first caretaker government appointed by Abbas, former governor of Bethlehem.

* Marwan Barghouthi, leader of the Fatah Tanzim movement and accused by Israel of responsibility for planning the Second Intifada, has been in Israeli jail since 2002, serving several consecutive life terms. Barghouthi was instrumental in the negotiations that resulted in the “Prisoners Document”, which attempted to facilitate the formation of a national unity government in 2007.

* Hussein Ash-Sheikh, head of the PA Civil Affairs Department in Ramallah.

* Muhammad Dahlan, former head of the PA Preventative Security Forces in Gaza, he left Gaza shortly before the Hamas rout of his forces in mid-June 2007, who was also Palestinian point man for the 2005 Israeli unilateral “Disengagement”. Both times — in 2005 and in 2007 — he was absent from Gaza for surgery on his knees in Germany. Dahlan is also a member of the PLC, and either is, or was, Palestinian National Security Advisor. According to a report in Ma’an, Dahlan reportedly ‘shocked’ the Fatah Conference delegates on Saturday by stating that all of Fatah was responsible for tthe rout of Preventive Security Forces by Hamas in Gaza in mid-June 2007: “I tolerated more than mountains could tolerate, and I am not responsible for the fall of Gaza to Hamas,” Dahlan said, amid an audible murmur of the audience. As a leader in Gaza, many saw Dahlan as a central figure in the loss of the Strip”. This report can be read in full here .

A full list of names of candidates running for positions on Fatah’s Central Committee is available on the Ma’an website here .